I am preparing to move soon, and am going through a lot of cruft that I’ve held onto for a number of years. I’m reading a book, actually, on how to let go of some of this stuff, and not surprising to some who know me, I’m taking the time to “digitize” some of the stuff I can’t stand to part with. This is such an example.

In 1986, I attended Ingomar Middle School in the northern suburbs of Pittsburgh, PA. I have to say, of all the years of going to school, this was the best for me. I know it was a combination of caring, awesome teachers, but also knowing a number of kids who I could relate with. I did well in the 6th grade and I hated to leave the next year when my family moved to the Cleveland, OH, area.

The object which I scanned above is a coaster of some sort. We had to take a home economics class, and we learned how to cross-stitch. This was something I created and I have not been able to throw it away since middle school. In part, I have positive feelings about this school, as I have shared. But if it were, say, a concert program, or a report card, I’d look at it, then toss it. But this is different. This was something I put my mind to, my hands to, this is something I made. The object is homemade.

My sentimentality aside, I think it’s worth noting for the sake of this blog post the importance we place on objects we create. There’s a mental distinction I think between a worksheet we fill out, and something bigger, say, like this coaster. The apron I made later in the 7th grade in Ohio wasn’t as good as this in terms of craftsmanship (although, I am sad to admit, I too still own). But this was something I look back on as an object representing some personal success. I learned a new skill, I tried my hand at it, and wow, it had utility beyond, well, a worksheet.

I am not sure what the magic is between an object like this, and say, the worksheet. But in this case, if it was the color, the yarn, the texture, and the perceived utility behind it, it mattered to me. I wonder what my teacher, Mrs. Conrad, would think of me keeping this for so long. What did she intend for her students to do with these, when, say, they’d go to high school? College? Toss them away, no doubt.

I think it may be time to say goodbye to this part of my past, but not before I find value in keeping it so long. As educators, I think we have a duty to give students the opportunity to create things that resonate with them and mean something, well, personal. It won’t always be a physical object, but those are easiest to persist the age of time. It illustrates for me, again, the nuance between personalized and individualized learning. Facts are remembered and forgotten, unused. Emotions remain with us forever, even if it requires holding or touching something from our past.

More recently, I’ve heard the term “balance” come up in education circles, and sometimes it rubs me the wrong way. Some balance, I’d argue, is good; other balance could be dangerous.

Balance with Screentime

I took part in a conversation recently with some teachers and one offered this sentiment: “Learning through a screen all the time isn’t what’s best for kids; sometimes they need to learn in a different way, maybe, by building something with their hands.” I found the idea easy to agree with, and even though my work is often tied to learning through screens, I think we learn through experience, not through glass. Balance in this regard is apt, when it comes to any one thing we do directed at learning. Learning should mimic the full range of human capacity for experiencing our world.

Balance with Assessment

A number of folks recently visited us here in Goochland to learn more about our Balanced Assessment Project. This effort, organized originally by Dr. Geyer in 2013, set out to re-engineer how we conduct and do assessment within Goochland. In short, we now use a variety of assessment types to provide a more holistic view of student progress with learning. Balance in this regard reminds me of a balanced plan for more healthy living. A doctor wouldn’t likely recommend heavy, strenuous exercise alone, while we could eat all the junk food we might find. We also might not fully benefit from a super-healthy diet when our activity level is low. Balance in this regard is a healthy diet, moderate, regular exercise, and balancing our day to day activities to include things that help us reduce stress and find happiness.

Balance with Instruction

I actually do not have one specific example here, but this is will illustrate the more dangerous interpretation of balance we might make. I am sure there is a name for what I’m trying to describe. It’s when you take a general concept and apply it to something else, but the comparison isn’t entirely congruent. The example I have is with coding, which is the contemporary term for computer programming. (It also extends to things that are technically not programming, like HTML creation for webpages, but to most folks, the interpretation is the same.) We are currently offering two after school coding clubs at Goochland and Randolph, led by Ms. Parrish. She took this on completely on her own, and I know eventually, she’d like to have the experience available to all three elementary schools. I think what she has done is a dream come true and give her 100% of the credit for the success of these programs. Students come to these weekly sessions excited and energized and the types of learning taking place is deep.

The idea behind a liberal education, which is more apt a description of many undergraduate programs today, centered on having a well-rounded (balanced) exposure to a number of different disciplines of learning. That same idea is certainly echoed in our state standards. We don’t just teach math to kids who seem to like it. We teach it to all of them.

We do sometimes marginalize some subjects/disciplines. Band or chorus. Or, music or art. We do let kids choose with some things in middle and high school, but the “core” is always there.

The one thing that has stayed with my training years ago as a future music teacher was that music, and really all the arts, belonged to humankind, not just kids who seemed to like music, or show an aptitude. I could say the same thing about coding. Coding as an educational method helps the learner develop skills around how to think in logical ways. I’m so happy there’s an opportunity for some kids to develop coding skills through an extra-curricular club (and for parents who are interested, I can point them to a number of excellent online opportunities for learning, too, that are free). But balance in this regard is dangerous.

The same goes for a “balance” between student-centered and teacher-centered instruction. So many of us were taught how to teach (or it was modeled for us as students ourselves) on how to present and rehearse information to/for students. When the sole source of information is the teacher, we are robbing kids of the opportunity to be self-directed learners and human beings. I think if we’re being honest, we are currently balanced in our schools here in the United States. As general practice, we mix up (balance) our instructional delivery methods with different instructional design models. But it’s the student-centered ones that we ought to be considering. The wholesomeness of balance is apt, but not when it’s between spoon-feeding and inquiry.

I want to be honest – I rely upon a lot of teacher-centered methods in my own teaching. But I’ve been getting better. I love to lecture, I love to present ideas. I’ve seen teachers who are so talented at it, too. It’s not that kids cannot learn this way, they can. We all can. But if our vision is focused on something we’re calling deeper learning, with incredible focus on learning from students (which we’re calling engagement), and we’re learning how to better collect and utilize assessment, we need to be careful about the promise of a simple word like “balance.”

Balance Should Require Us to be Reflective

If you’ve made it this far, it’s probably obvious I’m reflective of my own role in the field of education. One way we can really use the term “balance” without it failing us is to make it personal. We’re hopefully not balancing one really good strategy for learning with a bad one, instead, we’re taking the time to stake stock of our tools, our abilities, and our effectiveness and how we are able to balance those. For example, I might love to lecture, but realize it’s not the best way for students to learn. So, I might balance by using my own experience as an entry event to a project where I turn over the learning to students. Or, a “bell-ringer” for an interactive debate in class. Or I balance my assessment strategy by giving students the ability to self-assess their learning on an upcoming assignment. The reality is, learning and teaching is a mixture of both art and science and with extreme limits on resources (among them, time), we are always attempting to balance the experiences we provide students. My ultimate point is to consider what we’re balancing, not to be satisfied alone with the idea that balance is, in itself, a virtue.

When I came to GHS in 1999, I taught from two classrooms. The first was in the main building, which is currently the County Administration building. You can see me in a photo taken by students with a digital camera owned by the school at the time, an Apple “QuickTake” camera. For some reason, you could only maybe get 15 pictures with the thing before you would have to replace the batteries.

There’s a couple of things interesting to me in the photo, and by extension, my thinking about teaching with technology.

In 1999, I used a whiteboard. The space also would be used (with a screen) to project onto the wall (the lights would have to go down, as the brightness was only 600 lumens).

In the back, right, was my classroom server running Macintosh Manager. Above that, on the wall, was a web URL beginning with http://, that pointed to an internal IP address for my intranet. It’s where I placed a lot of materials, especially for my advanced classes. It was my own website that was updated daily with the day’s agenda, tutorials, and even videos.

I take no ownership of the overhead projector, save to note that the classroom was also used by other teachers.

Sometimes we really liked using the tables in the room and as alternative to the computers, which were arranged along the perimeter of the room.

Take aways:

We still today need easy, effortless ways to shift our work between one machine and the other, or at least to present it easily to be seen my multiple people,

Fixed designs, especially with relation to tools, often are compromises. The best spaces are flexible ones.

Facing kids against a wall was never great for trying to have conversations with students or to discuss their work that lived virtually.

That’s one reason I like iPads in our classrooms supporting 1:1 – they provide for more flexible modalities, they allow some sharing with large groups using AirPlay, and because of their size, they tend not to get in the way of seeing/communicating with others face to face.

I was inspired by the designs for learning outlined in this brochure from Steelcase. When you see the flexibility available, you kind of realize “there doesn’t have to be just one way to orient your room.” By extension, not just one way to teach.

When the New Goochland High School opened in 2001, I taught a single class in room C143. That afforded great space, and larger, more capable computers, but the flexibility factor was still negatively impacted. I am not sure I could have foreseen the current state of learning and what some teachers have come up with.

Kudos to teachers who are open-minded enough, and flexible enough as we use mobile technology, to re-think, and re-orient their instructional spaces. Now, if I could only get used to sitting on the Pilates balls.

It wasn’t that long ago that I saw Mr. Goldman back at GHS, working as a substitute teacher. Terry Goldman was a fixture by the time I had come to Goochland High School in 1999. Formerly the library media specialist, when I met Terry, he was a social studies teacher who had high expectations for kids, for using high quality books in class, and finding something interesting to take away from history. Goldman was also a coach, and until recently, lived in the county. At last mention, I knew he had moved to South Carolina with his wife.

Terry Goldman passed away on February 23, 2015.

The memorial service will be on Friday, February 27, 2015, at 12:00 PM at the Temple Or Ami, 9400 Huguenot Road in Richmond, VA 23235, (804) 272-0017. A burial will follow at Greenwood Cemetery.

Mr. Goldman had a number of varied interests and he and I shared time talking about history, music, and even how to improve our schools a few times. Somehow, if you spent any time with him, you walked away a little richer. You might not have always agreed with Terry, but you were better off for the conversation.

Before we really got into G21, Terry was into project experiences for students. One year he was so excited that two students had built a trebuchet. He asked me to come talk to the students and photograph their work.

So, in my last blog post I referenced former math teacher Dan Meyer’s online curriculum–offered for free as slides in PDF, Keynote, and PPT formats–that he used with real, live students. His latest thinking about math instruction took him to a different type of online curriculum, using problems he creates, to be presented to students in three acts. You can even see a list of all of the ones he has created, and if that number of examples is not enough to be used with your students, they should provide enough context for creating one of your own.

I wanted specifically to look at the bubble wrap one because bubble wrap isn’t really that important. It’s just a prop. But it’s what I might call a sticky prop, one that is simple sure, but it offers just a little bit of engaging interest to us (or to our students). Popping bubbles is something people like to do, either to relieve stress, because they’re bored, or who knows why. It feels good/interesting/curious to pop bubbles. And your students have likely popped some bubble wrap in the past. And that’s what I mean by a sticky prop: bubble wrap is interesting enough to hook us into the problem.

The cool thing about Dan’s 3-act problem with bubble wrap is, once we’ve figured out how to answer his questions (which often start with us making guesses, then refining our guesses with data points), we can apply it to different situations. If someone a year from now were to ask us “How much do you want for painting the inside of my house?” you might reference a 3-act learning experience. Personally, I’d ask how many rooms, estimate an hourly wage, then guestimate how many hours it would take me to paint those rooms. Most math problems might attack the situation is a very analytical way with how many square feet there are in the house… By design, Dan’s 3-acts are tied to situations that are more real and more every day, and if they all are not practical, they at least are sticky enough to command some interest.

I also like that so many of Dan’s problems involve video as a medium. Short videos demand our focused attention, and we can play them back multiple times, if we missed what we were supposed to see. It’s up to us as educators, I think, to make use of the millions of hours of free video available to us now to think creatively about the potential math, unsolved problems, and curious questions that lurk in short clips.

If you’re interested in 3-act math, I might suggest a few next steps:

Read through at least 5 of the examples linked above to get a flavor of a 3-act math problem.

Find one that relates to your own content standards, and try it with students.

Create your own 3-act, by including images and/or video in the problem. You can create your own, or borrow something with sticky interest from YouTube.

This past Friday (February 13), we talked with teachers about using the Schoology platform to share digital content resources. In fact, this ability was one of the reasons we chose Schoology this past summer, and you can read more about how they envision it working. I wanted to write a few things about this capability, and why it is so important when we consider 1:1 computing in our schools.

First, not everyone is of a sharing mindset. Schoology gets around this by creating personal, local (district/school), and public sharing areas in resources. I get that not everyone wants to share the “things” they’ve created for teaching. From my own experience, when I came to Goochland, I was forced to invent my curriculum, my syllabus, and I started out creating 10 major projects for the advanced class I taught in Graphic Communications. While every student got a print-out of the semester’s projects, and they went into 3-ring binders, it wasn’t necessarily “public.” I needed some time to try these new projects out with students before I was ready to “publish” them. But for whom? No other teacher at the time taught what I did, so, what was the point in sharing them?

In Schoology now, I could share this content with teachers outside my district. Okay, that sounds interesting… we’re not just talking one high school now, but a lot of high schools. I think of folks like Dan Meyer, who has published his Algebra curriculum. He’s confident, for one, and he’s published his stuff to a worldwide audience. Schoology feels a little more safe; it’s not open to the world (unless you want it to be), but the modular system of learning object and course makes it possible to easily integrate whatever it is into what you want students to see. If I were teaching today, I’d start with sharing stuff I thought would be of value to others, but also content I was familiar with, and knew worked for my students.

Second, I might still utilize a textbook. Textbooks are reliable sources of information that someone else (an author, a publisher) has organized, added pictures, maybe graphs, and packaged in an accessible way for students. As successful #futureready leaders told us recently in Raleigh at a regional summit led by the U.S. Department of Education, their districts are choosing not to spend money on textbooks because do not adequately address the needs of today’s learners. New tools are available, but in addition, so are new pedagogies. To replace the role of a textbook, teachers are re-thinking the concept of the book or binder around the construct of the learning management system, one like Schoology. With Schoology providing the construct of courses and instructors, teachers are able to compile digital assets as resources and then add these assets into as many or few courses as they like. When the resources and activities are tagged with standards, it becomes possible to track student mastery of these standards providing a new level of assessment. In effect, Schoology becomes the new textbook, with resources culled from a teacher’s own personal library, commercial resources, and resources that are freely being shared by other like-minded teachers.

Third, everyone doesn’t have a lot of digital learning assets, yet… If you have not taught traditionally with a computer, then it may be challenging to embrace the idea of a collection of digital assets in lieu of a textbook. The 1:1 computing project we have begun helps with this in a big way by providing each student with access to a mobile computer that allows them to access the same Schoology system (read: twenty-first century textbook replacement), but with the enhancement that this system can keep track of access to the resource (Schoology reports how long students spend in each course), can assess student learning, and with the guidance of the teacher/course creator, can provide different students different types of learning experiences based on preference or need. Sounds great, but how do I start with these assets?

The Peer to Peer University organization capitalizes on the idea of free content exchange. Not to mention the OpenStax Project, with online content. The problem is, these projects are focused on higher education. But the same sharing exchange already exists within Schoology. We just have to be willing to first, share our own content (our content is someone else’s freebie!), and peruse what’s out there. In addition, there are some K-12 resources too worth exploring.

Khan, as an example, can be integrated into Schoology as an app. This means it’s even easier to plug content right in without having to navigate between multiple windows and services.

Conclusion

In the end, by putting a device in a student’s hand, and by accepting that a new tool like Schoology can offer more flexibility in how the content we use to teach can be organized, we are well on our way towards taking full advantage of collecting and organizing our own set of curated digital learning assets. Whether these assets are something we have purchased (a Discovery video, as an example), one we’ve created (a PDF, or a video tutorial), or one we’ve found online from a resource we like (a Ck12 activity), a learning management system like Schoology will become the place to house this content and share it with students within the context of a course. If you attended our sessions led by Bea, Zoe, and Glenn on Friday, thank you! We can’t wait to get started!

Goochland County is located in central Virginia. We’re a small school district with a strong history with technology integration. Teachers have been issued Apple laptops since 2001, when all of our schools went wireless. In 2005 we started the Blogging Initiative, which required of each teacher to maintain a blog for increasing communications between individual classrooms and our community. In 2008, we launched the G21™ Project-based Framework and teachers started with PBL in classrooms, tied to a focus of developing twenty-first century skills. In 2013, we launched a 1:1 pilot with iPads in grades 3-5 at Goochland Elementary School. In 2014, our superintendent James Lane became a Connected Superintendent. In 2014, too, we started using Schoology as a LMS in grades 3-12.

This school year we have expanded our 1:1 project to grades 5-6 district-wide. For SY 2015-16, the program will continue to expand to grades 4-7.

Our foundation and future plans for being future ready are directly tied to our strategic plan.

I wanted to share a resource via Edutopia. It’s a list of 40 questions teachers from a project-based learning school came up with to deepen a student’s thinking. See what you think about a few:

In what ways do you need to improve?

What does this piece reveal about you as a learner?

What the one thing you particularly want people to notice when they look at your work?

What will you change in the next revision of this piece?

Do you get the gist? Reflection is a powerful, purposeful practice of thinking about what you’re doing, what you’ve done, and what goals you set for the future. What might be some good reflective questions for parents? For teachers? For school administrators?

Our Virginia DOE has once again partnered with the Virginia Society of Technology in Education to sponsor a Digital Learning Day on March 13.

Several activities will be held on March 13 to highlight and celebrate participants across the nation. The VSTE will be doing a Digital Learning Day “kickoff event” on Thursday, March 12, at 7:30 p.m. The kickoff event will feature a webinar highlighting the VSTE 2014 award winners: Outstanding Leader: Janet Copenhaver, Henry County; Outstanding Teacher: Daniel Nemerow, Prince William County; and Innovative Educator of the Year: Teresa Coffman, University of Mary Washington. To view the webinar on Digital Learning Day, go to http://www.vste.org/index/learn/webinar. Schools, libraries, community programs, and classrooms are invited to showcase how they are using digital media to improve teaching and learning.

For me, and I know I’m not alone, every day is a digital learning day in Goochland. But there is plenty to learn and pick up from others, and if that’s a reason that resonates with you, I invite you to participate in the March 12 webinar and to explore what others are doing to celebrate technology in our schools this spring.

As educators, we sometimes bat around terms like “student-centered” when we are talking about learning and teaching in the classroom. A recent article by Katrina Schwartz features some of the ideas by Alan November that may make this term and this idea, more clear.

I wanted to pull a few out as we explore the concept of students taking control of their learning.

“November says that instant feedback trend should be embraced as a powerful learning tool.” Instant feedback, the author points out, is something built into video games, but also activities an engineer might engage in, such as writing a compute program. By extension, tools we can use to give feedback during a quiz are better than a quiz that just tallies up a score at the end. We need to find tools and methods that provide students quick, and if possible, continuous feedback loops.

“The benefit of technology is that is has opened the door on the scope of global problems that students can involve themselves with, making their problem solving skills immediately relevant and encouraging self-direction.” This reminds me of the challenge-based learning model espoused by Apple several years ago, out of their ADE community. It certainly resonates with a number of our G21 projects.

“Have students lost the ability to define the question?” I love stopping to ask students what they are doing, or better yet, “what are you learning right now?” There is such a satisfying feeling when a student can say “Right now, I’m trying to figure out…” or “We’re studying…” It’s clear with these types of responses that students are owning the learning process a little bit more. The next step is directing them how to ask big questions, embracing an inquiry-based approach to learning, so that conversations might be “I don’t know how this works, but I’d like to know (this) and (that)… gimme a second, and let me what I can find…” It’s teaching question-creating but also how to leverage the internet to course-correct their thinking, too.

Role forming should take place. “One way to replicate that ownership now is to give students classroom jobs, allowing them to contribute something powerful to the classroom dynamic.” You see this most often in the context of a project-based approach, where students learn their role within the larger group, developing a mindset around working collaboratively. But there’s no reason, following November, why this concept cannot be expanded to an entire classroom or even a school.

About this blog…

This is the blog of John Hendron, Ed.D., director of innovation & strategy for Goochland County Public Schools. Through this blog I share information for teachers, administrators and families dealing with learning and teaching with technology.